Terminal Transmission td-93

by Warren Murphy

  Half way through the broadcast, the anchor fell to the floor with a resounding crash. The other anchor-the one who was reading-kept on reading, his face turning red and his heart sinking along with his future.

  Then the calls started coming in.

  "Put up that damn anchor."

  "Are you just going to let it sit there?"

  "It's the best darn part of the show."

  Dave Sinnott knew public interest when he saw it. Not bothering to wait for the commercial break, he walked onto camera range and personally hoisted the anchor into place. It immediately fell, breaking his foot in two places.

  He hopped off the screen, venting choice curses.

  The switchboard was flooded with more calls. Taxis began dropping off excited viewers, offering to put the anchor up themselves. Fistfights broke out over the privilege.

  The first three who offered got the job. As the seated anchor droned on and on, slowly sinking into his chair, three Georgia Tech boys got the other anchor up and banged it into place, all but drowning out the weather with their hammering.

  The next day, offers to syndicate WETT News poured in.

  "How many buyers we got?" Jed Burner demanded over the cellular phone hookup when he got the word.

  "Thirty," Sinnott said proudly, "and they're still coming in."

  "What's the best of the lot?"

  "Two thousand."

  "Two thousand? Some prime jerk wants to buy mah whole station foah a measly two thousand dollahs?"

  "They don't want to buy the station. They want to buy broadcast rights to WETT News."

  "Explain it so a lil' ole sailor boy can get the nut of it, will you, son?"

  "We have over thirty cable stations vying for the right to rebroadcast WETT News. The best offer is two thousand dollars. Per episode. Seven days a week is fourteen thousand dollars, times fifty-two weeks is-"

  Jed Burner interrupted with a question. "What's cable?"

  "It's TV that is carried on wires. They gotta hook it up special. They also call it pay TV."

  "How come?"

  "People pay for it."

  "You joshin' me, son. TV's free. It's like oxygen. You buy a set and plug 'er in and you're set for life. Except for the commercials. Think we can get better ratin's if we cut out those dang commercials?"

  "Mr. Burner, if we had more commercials we'd be in the black."

  "Tell me some more about this cable thing," Jed Burner said slowly.

  Station manager Dave Sinnott patiently explained cable. He tried to keep it simple. He knew his boss had the approximate attention span of a gnat.

  "Never work in a million years," Jed Burner said at the end of it.

  "It's not doing so bad now. These cable outfits are hungry for product. And they'll throw just about anything on the air. That's why our news looks so good to them. It's different."

  "All them wires. Ridiculous. But back to this heah rebroadcast rights thing, are these good offers?"

  "Depends on what you compare them to."

  "Try comparin' them. Just to humor a poor cracker."

  "Well, compared to a locally produced show with its budget, these are right handsome offers," Sinnott admitted.

  "Ah hear a 'but' in your voice, boy."

  "Compared to what network affiliates pay for the big news shows produced up North, it ain't cowflop."

  Interest flavored Jed Burner's cornpone voice. "By what kinda margin?"

  Sinnott floated some figures and the silence on the line was prolonged. The rush of ocean water past a fiberglass hull was indistinguishable from static in his ear.

  He was about to ask if his boss had fallen overboard when Jed Burner's voice came back on the line. Gone was the loud, obnoxious attitude which, combined with his brash personality, had caused the print press to dub him "Captain Audacious."

  "You listen here. Forget all that rebroadcast stuff. Ah want you to take that there dinky news show we got and you build it up. Heah? Built it up so that it's bigger and better than the Northern shows. With me so far?"

  "Yes." The station manager's voice was a froggy croak.

  "Then you offer it around. But you undercut them network scuts. You undercut 'em good. Ah want WETT News carried on every station in the cottonpickin' country."

  "Impossible!"

  "Ain't nothin' impossible. What's it gonna take?"

  "Money. Millions."

  "Okay, you got the millions. Ah got a few shekels jinglin' in mah jeans. Mah daddy made himself a fair pile afore he passed on, even if he did kinda let this station thing go to pot. Anythin' else you'll be needin'?"

  "Yes," Sinnott said, crossing his fingers, "a bigger anchor."

  "Son, you got not one, but two anchors. Moolah's no object. Just make sure it's nailed down real good this time."

  "That's not the kind of anchor I meant."

  "What other kind is there?"

  "The news reader. They call them anchors, too."

  "Then we already got two anchors. Am Ah right?"

  "We need a bigger one."

  "Which should be bigger?"

  Sinnott thought fast. "Both. Especially the talking one."

  "Guy looks pretty hefty to me."

  "Ah meant a bigger name. One more recognizable. One of the network anchors."

  "Who's good, but cheap?"

  "Don Cooder."

  Then Jed Burner blurted out the question that was subsequently reported in Time, Newsweek, TV Guide, the New York Times-the question that would haunt him in the months and years to come.

  "Who the hell is Don Coodah?"

  At first, it was seen as a colossal joke. The brash entrepreneur who ran a station no one wanted, trying to launch a national newscast based on a spoof of the news.

  It would never have gotten off the ground had the station manager not understood that he had hit the bottom of his television career. It was make WETT News work or manage a Burger Triumph. If Dave Sinnott could find one that would take him on.

  It was 1980, and the booming cable TV industry, barely a decade old, was facing its first challenge: Satellite TV.

  Dishes were already beginning to appear in backyards and hotel lawns and bar roofs in anticipation of the next boom in broadcasting.

  Meanwhile, broadcast TV, reeling from the challenge of cable, fought back on every front. The first casualty was their own anchor system. Virtually overnight, the old guard of anchors, seasoned professionals, many of whom learned their craft on radio, were unceremoniously canned.

  And a crop of young manicured and tonsured celebrity anchors were brought in to replace them. Thus, the cult of the anchor was born.

  Overnight, the cream of television broadcast journalism was on the street.

  WETT News had its pick. So Dave Sinnott hired two of the best of the dispossessed anchors.

  They weren't flashy. They weren't backed up by computer graphics or identifying Chyrons, But they could read copy off a teleprompter and switch to script without skipping a syllable.

  Virtually overnight, WETT News was respectable.

  "We have to change our name," Dave Sinnott, now doubling as uncredited news director, said one day. "Folks are still laughing."

  "Is that bad?" Jed Burner asked via transatlantic telephone.

  "Very bad. We have to be serious now. An image change would help."

  "Okay-but we gotta keep the word News in there. How about Kable News-KN?"

  "Cable is spelled with a C."

  "No, Kable was spelled with a damn C. And you gotta add somethin' dignified."

  "Like what?"

  "Do Ah gotta come up with all the brilliant stuff in this operation? A dignified word. Try to get the word 'news' into it some more."

  "Twice?"

  "Why not? We're the news that is news. The newsy news."

  "How does Newsworthy News sound?"

  "Sounds dang dignified. Everything people say Ah ain't. Haw. Listen, gotta go. Dixie here's gettin' that dewy look about her. Ah want us up and runnin' in
a yeah. Got that?"

  "A year? You want a national news network in a year?"

  "Yeah. Normally Ah'd of given you only six months. But I can't on account of Ah'm embarkin' on a round the world cruise, just me and mah forty footer-and Trixie and Dixie and Hortense."

  "Hortense?"

  "Somebody's gotta do the scullery stuff. Ah told mah attorney to write you all the checks you want. If Ah come back in a yeah and find Ah'm dead broke and there's nothin' to show for it, Ah'm gonna take that expensive anchor of yours, tie you and him both to the real anchor, and drop you-all in white water. Catch mah drift?"

  "If it can be done, you'll have it, Mr. Burner."

  And so the race to launch the first national news network had begun, run by a man who had almost unlimited capital and nothing to lose.

  When the first commercial Satcom satellite went up, Dave Sinnott purchased a transponder.

  Then he had an office building behind WETT headquarters razed to the ground and a satellite dish farm laid out in neat white rows, like ridiculous but very attentive sunflowers.

  KNNN quadrupled its anchor staff, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day, just reading news. It was rough, it was hectic-and it carried over its original local audience just from the sheer ineptitude of it all.

  "The locals love it," he was informed in a staff meeting. "They're laughing twice as much."

  "It's not supposed to be funny now!" Sinnott complained.

  "And they're asking after the anchor."

  "Which one?"

  "Well, the one with the flukes mostly, but we're getting fan mail on the readers too."

  Dave Sinnott sighed, giving in to the inevitable. "Put it up again," he said weakly. "No, scratch that. Make it part of our logo. Burner'll like that."

  After six months, Sinnott received a staticky call that had been patched through from the sloop, Audacious.

  "This heah's Jed," the familiar boisterous voice announced.

  "Where are you?" Sinnott asked.

  "Becalmed off the Cape of Good Hope. Just like Vasco Da Gama, except he didn't have a lot of broads yappin' in his ear day and night. Listen, Ah been listenin' to the shortwave broadcasts. Folks is laughin' at me. What you're doin' up there?"

  "We're in all fifty states, twenty-four hours a day. By satellite. No wires."

  "They're sayin' Ah'm losin' a cool million a week."

  "In another six months, we'll be all turned around."

  "If you hadn't a said that, Ah was gonna turn mahself around and come wring your neck. You got six months, boy, or you're gonna have barnacles all over your back teeth. You and that anchor."

  "There are sixteen of them now, Mr. Burner."

  Dave Sinnott redoubled his efforts. He created bureaus in seven states. And all over Canada. That only added to the roughness of the broadcasts as miscued remote reporters were caught picking their noses on camera, and anchors could be heard belching and farting.

  Once, an aging anchor stroked out on camera. Ratings roared. Millions turned in to his replacement hoping for a repeat performance.

  Then Sinnott hit upon an idea worthy of his boss. The skies were full of satellites beaming network newsfeeds to affiliates for use on their local broadcasts, and these same transponders would relay local news clips for network use. Except the networks refused to release their clips until after their 7 p.m. feeds. In other words, the affiliates were expected to pitch in to help the networks and in return they got stale leftovers.

  It was the era of the ninety-minute local newscast. News was booming. Local stations from Dry Rot, Georgia to Bunghole, Oregon were fielding news crews equipped with microwave vans and satellite uplink capability. And even then they were starved for pictures.

  So KNNN offered them instant access to their feeds. Free. In return for reciprocal access to theirs.

  It was unheard-of. It was absurd. Everyone expected a hitch or trick or catch. There wasn't one.

  Once KNNN hooked a few affiliates here and there, the others came like lemmings. And the networks howled. But there was nothing they could do. Everyone was satellite dependent. And every hour of every day, the transponders relayed raw transmissions up and down, between cities, among states and across oceans, feeding a growing insatiable appetite for the news.

  There was no stopping it.

  By midyear, KNNN News became the most watched news program in human history-not necessarily because of its content.

  While broadcast news grew increasingly slick, polished, and show bizzy, KNNN News offered a relaxed alternative. Down Home news. It became their official slogan.

  At the end of the twelfth month, Jed Burner docked, dropped anchor, and was airlifted to KNNN Headquarters on West Peachtree.

  He hardly recognized the place. It was a beehive of activity. People were running around, frantic and white-faced.

  "What in hell's goin' on?" he roared.

  "We've gone black," a harried voice cried.

  Jed Burner brightened. "Damn fine. And right on schedule."

  "It's the third time this month!"

  "Now we're talkin'!"

  He burst into the station manager's office.

  "Ah heard the good news, boy."

  Dave Sinnott stopped shouting into the phone long enough to ask, "What good news?"

  "We're in the black!"

  "No, we've gone black. It's not the same thing."

  Jed Burner puffed furious cigar smoke. "Explain it to a li'l ole country boy."

  "We've lost our uplink to the satellite transponder."

  "You ain't doin' so good," he warned.

  "We can't get the TV signal up."

  "Yeah . . . ?"

  "That means it can't come down to the earth stations for rebroadcast!"

  "We're dead, then?"

  "No. We lose our picture a lot, actually."

  "How about our financial picture?"

  "We turned a profit two months ago. Everbody's watching us, from the White House on down to the outhouse."

  "They laughin'?"

  "Maybe some."

  "They stickin' with us?"

  "Not for long," Sinnott admitted.

  "We're losin' ratin's, then?"

  "That's not how it works anymore, Mr. Burner. People don't watch TV like they used to. They don't just sit and watch a show. They skip around, graze a little here and there. Channel surfing, they call it. We're perfect for that. As soon as five thousand people turn us off, there's another six tuning us in."

  "What's that mean?"

  "It means," said Sinnott, his chest puffing up in justifiable pride, "that on any given week, anyone with a satellite dish or a cable box is watching us. Everyone. "

  Jed Burner seized his cigar as the thought sunk in. He made faces. The thought appeared to be sinking more slowly than it should.

  "Don't you realize that this means?" Sinnott blurted. "You can sell this station for a bundle."

  "Sell! Are you loco? Ah ain't sellin' mah pride and joy. And what's more, you're fired for suggestin' such a dastardly thing."

  "Fired? I made KNNN what it is today."

  Jed Burner poked his station manager in the chest with his cigar. "With mah money. And Ah'll pay you six figures a yeah to go live out your lucky-dog life in obscurity. From now on, KNNN was mah idea, mah vision, mah-"

  "But that's not fair!"

  "Son, life ain't fair, but it was mah money that done it. That's all that counts in life. Who's signin' the damn checks. Now be a smart fella and take mah generous offer."

  Dave Sinnott did. It was either that or continue working for a lunatic.

  Jed Burner called a press conference that very day. He looked tanned and fit in immaculate white ducks, and he was holding two very photogenic blondes rented for the occasion.

  "It was mah idea," he said through cigar-clenching teeth. "From the start."

  "What about Dave Sinnott?" he was asked.

  "I didn't catch that name, boy."

  "He was your station manager."

>   "Front man. Just in case Ah piled up on a reef somewhere. All the time Ah was away Ah was guidin' things by telephone."

  "Isn't that an unusual management style for a TV network?"

  "If Ah'm gonna cover the entire globe, Ah had to see it with mah own eyes, didn't Ah?" Burner countered.

  "Globe?"

  "That's right. KNNN is nationwide after only a yeah. We're puttin' news bureaus all over the dang world now. We're gonna be global inside of two yeahs."

  The assembled press gasped.

  And Jed Burner took his cigar out of his big mouth and beamed broadly.

  "They don't call me Captain Audacious for nothin', boy."

  True to his word, KNNN went global. When wars broke out, KNNN was there first, booking the best hotels. If there was a coup, KNNN was first on the scene. In the global village, KNNN was the town crier of many faces-fast, rough, sloppy, but instant.

  Jed Burner explained it like this in a Playboy interview:

  "Not everybody's got the time to brew a good pot of coffee. We're the instant brand. Folks want brewed, they wait for the networks to serve some up. You want it now, you got it-on KNNN."

  For one roller-coaster decade, KNNN could do nothing wrong. If their coverage of the Gulf War infuriated some viewers, it didn't matter. There were always more. Presidents swore by KNNN. The Pentagon watched it constantly. If the farting and the belching died down as more anchors were added and coffee and lunch breaks inaugurated, people still tuned in hope of catching KNNN at an awkward moment.

  And as KNNN's fortunes climbed, the networks declined. Strapped for operating funds, they closed bureaus all over the globe. KNNN snapped up the leases the next day. Before long, the networks were carrying KNNN footage on a regular basis, trading off economy for the humiliation of advertising their chief rival.

  The night broadcast TV went black for seven minutes. Accompanied by his latest trophy wife, his hair now as gray as an old salt's, Jed Burner was on his 129-foot yacht equipped with helipad and Superpuma helicopter.

  The deck phone rang. It was his private secretary.

  "Mr. Burner," she said tightly, "the networks are blacked out."

  "Screw 'em. They're dinosaurs." He clapped and hand over the telephone mouthpiece and hollered in the direction of the bow. "Honey, you're gonna pull a pretty hamstring if you keep bendin' yoahself into petzel-like shapes."